Tag: USA

Purpose unclear. Why are the FBI *really* trying to subvert encryption?

Tim cook says Apple will fight a federal order to help the FBI hack an iPhone.  

An earlier version of this page has a paragraph which seems to have been deleted later;

It was not immediately clear what investigators believed they might find on Farook’s work phone or why the information would not be available from third-party service providers, such as Google or Facebook, though investigators think the device may hold clues about whom the couple communicated with and where they might have travelled.

Is that “Whom” grammatically correct?

This does raise a ‘why’ in my mind.
Cant the other service providers (who would it be, AT&T, Verizon?) supply the ‘traffic analysis of who they communicated with? Isn’t this the sort of “metadata” that the government spies are supposed to be collecting?

Opening the phone won’t give the content of the messages past, they are gone like the snows of yesteryear[1]. Dead as the author of that famous quote.

So what are the FBI looking for? The address book? I’m not sure how helpful that will be and its likely to cast suspicion on innocent parties. Continue reading Purpose unclear. Why are the FBI *really* trying to subvert encryption?

An OP-ED by Richard Clarke on China

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/03/opinion/how-china-steals-our-secrets.html

This is better written than most ‘chicken little’ pieces, but please can we have ‘history’ of how most nations, including the USA, have engages in ‘industrial espionage‘.

I recall a presentation by CSIS that was making the point that Canada’s greatest threat on the Industrial Espionage scene was France, and France had been practising Industrial Espionage against the “English Speaking World” for centuries. And he had evidence to back that up from at lest Napoleonic times.

But then don’t forget that the “English Speaking World” stole such secrets from China as “Tea“:

For centuries, the secret of growing tea was one of China’s
most closely-guarded treasures. Along with silk, tea was an
extremely valuable agricultural commodity, prized as a luxury
item across Asia and into Europe.

In the mid-19th century, however, Briton Robert Fortune
dressed as a Chinese man (complete with queue) and set out
to discover the secret of tea-growing. He located the bushes
that produce tea, and stole seedlings that he transported to
British India. China’s tea monopoly was broken.

Robert Fortune (1812-1880)
Robert Fortune (1812-1880) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Fortune’s explorations are detailed in a new book, For All
the Tea in China, by Sarah Rose. She frames this not
simply as a tale of Victorian exploration, but as early
industrial espionage – which, of course, it was.

I’m not saying this justifies anything, any more that the Opium trade or forcing products from the Industrialized West onto Asian markets, also part of or common historic context, justifies any reprisals.

I’m just saying Context is Everything and if you ignore history (especially when dealing with people for whom history is an important context) then you are setting yourself up for a sea of troubles.

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Naval War College uses Russian software for iPad course material

http://www.nextgov.com/nextgov/ng_20120305_6368.php

GoodReader

The Navy’s premier institution for developing senior strategic and
operational leaders started issuing students Apple iPad tablet
computers equipped with GoodReader software in August 2010,
unaware that the mobile app was developed and maintained by
a Russian company, Good.iWare, until Nextgov reported it in February.

OK so its not news and OK I’ve posted about this before, but …

Last week I was reading another report about malware and it stated that most malware yamma yamma yamma had it origins in the USA. No doubt you’ve seen reports to that effect with different slants.

So the question here is: Why should software produced in the country where there are more evil-minded programmers be superior to software produced in Russia? Continue reading Naval War College uses Russian software for iPad course material

Upside and downside: How I hate Journalists

http://compliancesearch.com/compliancex/insider-trading/senate-votes-to-ban-insider-trading-by-its-members/

And this doesn’t actually stop them form making use of ‘insider information’ they just have to declare it within 30 days.

No, wait, sorry … you mean that the legislators are saying that legislators shouldn’t do something that is illegal anyway? Or that, if they do something that is already illegal, it is OK as long as they declare it within 30 days? …

It gets worse:

http://compliancesearch.com/compliancex/insider-trading/house-republicans%E2%80%99-insider-trading-bill-accused-of-catering-to-insiders/

I’d like to claim the system is rigged so ‘the rich get richer’ but if I did that some people who claim they are right wing would accuse me of being left wing. Indeed, this tells me that their political outlook has not progressed since 20 June 1789. This one-dimensional view fails to describe the rich variety of political attitudes in the Washington, never mind the rest of the USA and points elsewhere on the physical compass.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pournelle_chart
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nolan_Chart

Just those two show we need more that 4 axes to describe a political stance. But as I mentioned in a previous post, journalists are simple-minded and expect the rest of the world to be as limited in outlook and understanding.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_spectrum

Try this test:
http://www.politicalcompass.org/

How does this all relate to InfoSec, you ask.
Well part of that Political Compass is a view of ‘how authoritarian’.
And that gets back to issues we have to deal with such as Policy and Enforcement, Do We Let Employees have Access to the Internet, and the like.

Hans Eysenk pointed out that the right wing (e.g. Fascism and Nazism) had a lot in common with the left wing (communism). Both are repressive, undemocratic and anti-Semitic. So on these issues, at least, the left-right distinction is meaningless.

How many more such simplistic distinctions such as those foisted on us by journalists are equally meaningless.

Some while ago my Australian fellow ex-pat Les Bell, who apart from being a CISSP is also a pilot, pointed out to me that the method of ‘root cause analysis‘ is no longer used in analysing plane crashes. The reality is that “its not just one thing”, its many factors. We all know that applies in most areas of life.

I suspect most people know that too; its not restricted to the digerati.
There is the old ditty that explains how because of a nail an empire was lost, but no-one is proposing that we fix the failing of the “American Empire” by manufacturing more nails.

Except possibly Journalists.

 

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“Cybercrime” is still Crime and “Cyberfraud” is still Fraud

http://www.techsecuritytoday.com/index.php/our-contributors/michael-vizard/entry/lifting-the-veil-on-cybercrime

This says it all:

At the end of the day, cybercriminal activity is not all that different
from more traditional forms of organized crime. Obviously, the way the
crime is perpetrated is new, but the ways in which cybercriminals
operate is not all that different from anything that has gone on before.

Heck, once upon a time there was no telegraph, no “Royal Mail” (or whatever the equivalent in your state/nation). But when those came along they offered new opportunities for fraud. Most places have laws in place again fraud perpetrated by mail or telegraph and telegraph
includes the telephone.

And this is where I get to wonder at how our politicians work, the knee-jerk “something must be done NOW” attitude.

Here in Canada we have a criminal code. It covers fraud. We don’t need new laws to deal with cybercrime because the ways our laws are written they are general and not reductionist. They specify the crime, not the technology used.

I get the impression that in the USA (and possibly other places) its the other way round. That’s why they need lots of new laws to address every fine-grained detail as the technology advances. Personally I don’t think this is a good way of working since it piles laws upon laws.

In science we was that in astronomy before Newton. The classical “Ptolemaic” system piled epicycles upon epicycles as corrections because the underlying model based on a geocentric approach and the idea of ‘perfect spheres’ was fundamentally flawed. Piling human laws upon human laws to deal with special cases of what is really a general
situation is no less flawed in approach.

Cover of "Paper Moon"

Fraud is fraud is fraud. It doesn’t matter if its perpetrated by a hustler in person as in the scenes in “Paper Moon“, by mail, over the phone or using the Internet. Fraud is fraud is fraud.

We don’t need new laws; we just need a better understanding of how criminals use technology. We perhaps we security droids don’t, perhaps the public, the police, the legislators and the managers of the firms and organizations impacted by such criminals need that understanding.

But that’s not what detailed, reductionist legislation is going to achieve, is it?

 

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Doubts about “Defense in Depth”

 So to have great (subjective) protection your layered protection and controls have to be “bubbled” as opposed to linear (to slow down or impede a  direct attack).

I have doubts about “defence in depth” analogies with the military that many people in InfoSec use.

Read what they are really talking about in those military examples: its “ablation”: that means burning up resources, like land (the traditional defence the Russian Empire used) or manpower (the northern states used in the US civil war) and resources (the USA in WW2).  They try to slow down a direct and linear attack, hopefully to a standstill.

As the Blitzkrieg showed in dealing with the Maginot Line, if you “go around it” the defence isn’t a lot of use.

Through the ages of war and politics and empire-hood and nation-hood and tribalism we’ve seen many threats and attacks and subversions used.

The reality is that many InfoSec defences are more like umbrellas, the assume that the attack in coming from a particular direction in a particular form.  What’s needed is more like an all-enclosing “bubble” rather than something linear with the ‘defence in depth’ model.  But that gets back to the problem of the perimeter.

Many wifi enabled devices are really “spies inside the defensive perimeter”.

There was a scare a while ago that various networking equipment was made by companies or fabricators in places that were or might be inimical or economic competitors and as such have subversive code hidden in them.  No doubt this will come around again when journalists have nothing better to write about or the State Department need to wave a big stick and scare the public — its form of showing that “its doing something”.

But how can we tell? The reality is that “security specialists” are finding errors – never mind deliberately malicious code – in all manner of devices: pacemakers, insulin pumps, automobile throttle controllers. Will they find “errors” that allow subversion in mainstream IT deceives like home wifi routers (aka the next generation of spambots), home PC software (that’s a no-brainer isn’t it!) never mind commercial databases.

I dedicate this to the memory of Ken Thompson
http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ken/trust.html

“Impact” is not a Metric

I never like to see the term ‘impact’.
Its not a metric.

I discuss how length, temperature, weight, are metrics whereas speed, acceleration, entropy are derived values. In the same sense, ‘impact’ is a derived value – “the cost of the harm to an asset”. The value of an asset can be treated as a primary metric, but how much it is “impacted” is a derived value.

This is the same kind of sloppy thinking, the same failure to identify tangible metrics as we see when people treating ‘risk’ as if it were something tangible, never mind a metric! Continue reading “Impact” is not a Metric

Swine Flu Issues – insufficient discrimination

The trouble with some people is that they make some deceptively reasonable comments that don’t stand up under critical analysis

 With an ailing economy and a whole lot of cancelled contracts resulting from
that poor economy. Pandemic planning is a major threat to our most important
asset people and it appears as though that vulnerability may have been
activated. Its time to dust off the BCP plan and update it with a Pandemic
Mitigation strategy.

If it takes a pandemic to motivate you to create or review a BCP then
something is seriously wrong, and it has nothing to do with the pandemic.

Pandemic?
As one manager said to me a long time ago, “show me the numbers”.
I read:

The number of confirmed cases rose Monday to 50 in the U.S., the result
of further testing at a New York City school. The WHO has confirmed 26
cases in Mexico, six in Canada and one in Spain. All of the Canadian
cases were mild, and the people have recovered.

The Mexican government suspects the virus was behind at least 149 deaths
in Mexico, the epicentre of the outbreak, with hundreds more cases
suspected.

I’m sure just about any ocotr – or the ‘Net – can supply us with figures on the cases and deaths from ‘regular’ flu world-wide, as well as the named versions. Continue reading Swine Flu Issues – insufficient discrimination